Technology and the future of human development

Doug Hornig, Senior Editor of Casey Research's Daily Dispatch, offers an interesting review of a book titled 'Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think'.  It examines the promise of technology to transform our lives in the near term.  Here's an excerpt.

Abundance was written by Peter Diamandis in collaboration with journalist Steven Kotler. Diamandis, for those who don't already know him, is a 51-year-old world-class futurist, innovator, and entrepreneur. He has degrees in molecular biology and aerospace engineering from MIT, as well as an M.D. from Harvard Medical School. He's founded or cofounded a staggering array of new companies and organizations, including the X Prize Foundation, Singularity University, the International Space University, and the Space Generation Foundation, among others. In April of this year, his name hit the headlines again as cofounder of his latest venture, Planetary Resources, Inc. – backed by Google's Eric Schmidt and Larry Page, Ross Perot, Jr., and film titan James Cameron, among others. It is dedicated to developing the commercial feasibility of asteroid mining. This guy does not think small.

The book is not full of the pie-in-the-sky dreams of visionaries ungrounded in reality. Rather, it focuses on technology that is right here, right now, or will be in the very near future ...

Diamandis is also a man after our own hearts with his commitment to the free-market system and his disdain for government's invariably botched attempts to "help" people in need. Regarding the latter, he quotes economist William Easterly who points out, "The West has spent $2.3 trillion in foreign aid over the past five decades and still has not managed to get twelve-cent medicines to children to prevent half of all malarial deaths." It'd be difficult to find one sentence that better sums up the ongoing futility of a policy that enriches a few corrupt kleptocrats at the expense of millions of others.

The way forward, Diamandis understands, is through technology. That's what got us out of the caves in the first place, and it is what will forge a future that is bright not only for those nations now privileged, but for everyone. And the first thing that needs be done, as always, is to secure the essentials of life. Food, water, energy, shelter.

Take water, for example – a huge concern in many parts of the world. Diamandis details the work of Dean Kamen, a self-taught physicist, inventor, and multimillionaire entrepreneur who started out devising a more efficient way of getting sterile water to dialysis patients, who need five gallons a day. Then Kamen began thinking more broadly, not just about helping, in his words, "a few tens of thousands of dialysis patients … if I made a different machine … it might help a few billion people."

So he did. In 2003, he perfected the Slingshot – a machine the size of a dorm-room refrigerator, with a power cord, an intake hose, and an outflow hose. It can produce 250 gallons of water a day, using the same amount of energy it takes to run a hair dryer, provided by an engine that can burn just about anything (it's been run on cow dung). It's designed to run maintenance-free for at least five years.

Says Kamen: "Stick the intake hose into anything wet – arsenic-laden water, salt water, the latrine, the holding tanks of a chemical waste treatment plant; really, anything wet – and the outflow is one hundred percent pure pharmaceutical-grade injectable water."

The Slingshot costs about $100,000, but Kamen figures machines could be mass produced to sell for $2,500, with another $2,500 for the engine. Amortized over five years, that pegs the cost of producing nearly 1,000 liters of drinking water per day at a microscopic $0.0027/liter. Kamen has negotiated a deal with Coca-Cola to launch a series of Slingshot field trials. One bright guy has partnered with a global giant that sees the commercial potential, and between them they're poised to resolve an enormous problem that's vexed governments and NGOs forever.

There's more at the link.  The review itself is very informative, and it's making me think seriously about buying the book, too.  Whether or not you do that, I think the information provided is worth thinking about.

Peter